Burning

Just a few days ago, I made up a batch of Spam spread sandwiches. This is a 'recipe' that dates back to the long lost days of my youth. My mother would make these sandwiches for all of her after game parties she held in the early 1970s. Celebrations held every Friday night through football and basketball season. Cans of Spam shredded with a cheese grater, along with cheddar cheese. Also from a time when cheese had to be grated up, as well. 

Mixed up with sweet pickle relish, 'Miracle Whip' mayonnaise and horseradish sauce, spread onto hamburger buns and wrapped individually in 'tin foil' packets. Don't forget the salt and pepper, because you cannot have Spam sandwiches without that extra salt! And then baked in the oven until warm and toasty!

Having not purchased Miracle Whip in decades, I use a dollop of our ever present jar of mayonnaise from the fridge. Also, because it is 2023, these gooey ooey sandwiches are simply wrapped up in a paper towel and microwaved for 30 seconds each. Even minus the numerous glass dishes filled with mixed nuts and butter mints, these sandwiches never fail to transport me back to my single digit years.

I read a line in a book a few years back that stated, 'Every time a person dies, a library burns'. All of their thoughts, feelings and memories just bleeped away with that last breath. This week, my cousin passed away. obituary Born just one month after me, she was the closest cousin to me in age. I have memories of many summer days spent playing Barbies in her bedroom or puddling through the reeds in the Bass Lake shallows.

This June is fourteen years since my father passed away. Fourteen years, and feels like both an eternity and a single moment, at the same time. I never don't miss him. Yet, this season I forgot until the day after the anniversary of his passing. It hurts my heart to think I could forget, even for that single moment. Just couple weeks earlier, we celebrated what would have been his 96th birthday with our yearly glass of Gin and pink lemonade in his honor.

Pungent smoke hangs heavy,

caught tight inside the bitter cold.

Wood burned red hot,

loses its blistered heat.

Sweet thoughts of times gone by,

are held inside the fragrant scent of burning pine.

Suspended in the ringlets,

locked frozen in the winter harshness,

crackling logs bring recollections of autumn days

and summer eves.

The scents and senses of childhood

joys and friendships lost.

A wisp of wind spirals

the perfume of melancholy memories away.

Read More

Just checking in

Hotel room view of snow on the mountains. 

It has been a long time since I posted anything here. The past several months have been filled with the crazy that is our life. We have moved three times, all while I have been suffering the effects of long covid. Just as we were packing up for our first recent move in January, I came down with covid for the third time. The first two bouts of this virus were before vaccines became available, Spring 2020 for several months, then March 2021 for a month. This third time I was fully vaxed. The actually sickness lasted a week or so. The effects of long version virus is still keeping me down. Exhaustion I just can't shake and the brain fogginess are the worst part.  I am just so tired of being tired. Blah.

Driving through snow to baby's birthday party.

Being stuck in the crazy SoCal weather ever since we moved back from the Bay Area, the snow and rain just won't let go. While we have had moments of snow covered mountains since we moved out to California 12 years ago, most snow scenes lasted just a day or so, as the Cali warmth would melt it away. Beginning last autumn, we have had snow on our mountains constantly for eightish months. Even now, the first week of June there remains the lasts bit of the cold wet snow clinging to the deep crevices thousands of feet above us.

On the day of my youngest grandbaby's first birthday, the wet whiteness fell for well over an hour. Wet goopy flakes felt just as cold as snowstorms from our Minnesota memories. Even now, days away from the beginning of summer, we are twenty plus degrees cooler daily than those Minnesota folks are enjoying. 

Between moving from the apartment we moved into in late 2021 to where we live now, we played vagabonds, living with my daughter, son in law and grandbabies for a few weeks. Then several more week in the local extended stay hotel while waiting for the new apartment to open up. Having spent 18 months being hotel bound, we didn't think it would be hard to stay in one again. Sadly, the quality of this last hotel was bad. Between vomit and dog doo doo left for days in the hallways, to literal AR15 live shells dropped right outside our hotel room door, it was not a good experience. 

Finally, we moved into our new home. Because this is the way things have been going lately, moving came came with pounding, pouring rain. Cold, wet and four inches deep right in front of our door. MN son and daughter in law, touring with work through the southwest, stopped by for the second visit in under a month to help us move in. 

First day moving in moments.

Now, after two months in our new place, we are all moved in and life is settling back into a pattern of normal. Having hoped that with a 'normal' lifestyle returning my brain would settle back to normal, as well, I am frustrated living with this strange fog brain. Still, we have been busy building storage shelves in the garage and creating a patio garden filled with flowers instead of weeds. Just writing this update shows that I am improving, at least a bit. Flowers and sunshine, what more could we want?

Springtime in the garden.

Read More

The corners of my mind

While I consider this blog as much a diary as a public forum. That being said, I still tend to skip over some of the hardest realities of my universe. I posted recently about our grand trip to Minnesota, including our 'Minnesota Bound' get together. The invitation for this gathering was posted up on the Facebook events section about three weeks ahead of time. One of the people accepting our invitation was my best friend from high school, Margaret. (I wrote a long post years ago about how Thomas was going to be named Margaret if he were a girl)

Through the years, we lost touch. 😥 This photo was taken in my high school bedroom when I came home from college for the summer. I don't have a photo of us together. Sighhhh...

Then, Facebook happened. Yay! I can read about the lives of so many friends from back in the day. Facebook has its problems, but that connection is invaluable. 

Heartbreakingly, in the time between her responding 'yes' to our Minnesota Bound' event and the actual event, Margaret passed away. Margaret "Cheech" K. Weisbrod. Margaret had been living with Lupus for the majority of her adult life. I am so sad for her and her brothers and other loved ones. I am also heartbroken that the opportunity to see one another again was lost.  

My memories flow out freely. 

I never called her Cheech, not ever. She was always, always Margaret to me. 

Margaret taught me to eat mushroom pizza on Fridays during lent. As a Catholic, I had spent the majority of those Fridays eating tuna casserole. 😑 We shared long road trips on the team bus for basketball! During which the conversation was definitely R or so rated. Ahhhh...high school. I spent many a night sleeping over at her house and her at mine. There were also those warm summer days swimming at Manke's Resort across the water from where they lived on Spec Lake. Because they were neighbors of the resort, she got in free, thus so did I when I was with her.

We would always go to Princeton for movie nights. Mainly horror! Driving home late at night alone was terrifying! I saw Halloween for the first time in that theater with Margaret. It was the most horrifying movie of my life forever! 👿I have told my children many times about Margaret screaming "GET. OUT. Of the water!!!" at a different movie during a  particularly gruesome scene. I wish I could remember what movie that was so I could watch it again.

 We stopped at her family bakery...the Weisbrod Bakery for snacks when we were out and about.

The last time I 'talked' to Margaret on Facebook, she wished me a happy birthday. Not odd for Facebook, except I don't have my birthday listed on there. 40+ years and she still remembered my birthday.

We shared the last moments of our childhoods together. My heart hurts.

Back in 2019, just moments before the Covid pandemic roared to life, my high school boyfriend Brian died.  Brian James McClellan. Though he passed away just days after Halloween, I am still in shock. Again, we had not spoken in years, but the memories are still vibrant in my mind. His birthday was Christmas Eve. We spent New Year's Eve together at our cabin up on Snaptail Lake. Winter in Minnesota!!! He also spent time with me up at the Osakis house before it was sold.

He lived in the same house as my best friend since kindergarten, Also my college roommate, Lori. She moved into our neighborhood when we in the second grade. He took me to my very first rock concert, the Doobie Brothers. https://www.last.fm/music/The+Doobie+Brothers We went to Star Wars together down at Northtown Mall at a time when A movies did not show in Cambridge, Minnesota. For instance, I went to the local theater with my friends and saw the Ma and Pa Kettle movies in the mid-70s.

The typical he's a senior, I'm a sophomore relationship, we had a summer of marching band trips before he left our high school. This included a swimming party over in Wisconsin at band director, Richard Hardy's lake cabin. During my junior year, he helped me build a cardboard box train for my high school child development class. Five child size boxes all hand painted in delightful playfulness. He asked me to marry him that night. At the time, I said I was too young to answer that question.

Somewhere in a storage box, I still have an electronic counter he made for me in his basement workshop. I would watch the tiny red digital numbers counting up in my dark room at night.

So much time spent together during the twilight of my childhood. 💔

When you add in that Molly, the sister I shared a room with, a childhood with, a lifelong bond with, has been gone these past twenty-six years, the three people who shared the vast majority of my young, almost adult life with me are now gone. These memories I have are now mine alone. 

Written by me in 1996.

My heart aches for those sweet, innocent moments of life.

Read More

8mm memories

Snaptail Lake, MN (early 70s) 13 minutes

This past spring, we used our tax return to purchase an 8mm to digital converter to make the stack of old films sitting in my closet for years could be viewable once again. We purchased the Wolverine MovieMaker Pro from Amazon. It took several calls to the company to figure out why we could not get the recorder working...AT ALL. But, after the initial frustrations, we were able to transfer all of the films I have in less than a week. We still have a few flickering flops, that will need to be redone, but we have viewable family memories for the first time in decades. Yay!

There were incredibly large amounts of hunting footage on the film reels. Not surprising considering the many vivid memories I have of carcasses hanging in the rafters of our garage every autumn. What was missing, sadly, was the plastic 5 quart bucket of 8mm films we watched many Christmases, Thanksgivings and many other gatherings. The majority of the footage of my own childhood were not in my collection. 😥

I do, however, have the film of my parent's wedding back in 1948. Many reels of the older siblings. And by many, there were only a dozen reels to begin with in the box. When finished, I ended up with 61 clips. Some are a few minutes long. The longest reel held about 14 minutes of footage. Some just a few seconds. I had begun to cut to the clips into smaller pieces. Then, my daughter ended up in the hospital two months early, delivering our newest granddaughter. Born at four pounds, she spent a few weeks in the NICU. 

  

Eight months later, she is a healthy, always smiling little girl. The early delivery distracted me from editing most of the 8mm digital files. A very happy distraction.💟 It has become another 'someday' project. At least, I have the files and can view them whenever I want. 

Green Lake family reunion (1962?) just under 5 minutes

This final video I will post is from my parents wedding, filmed 74 years ago.

Greg and Shirlee wedding then 4th of July (1948) 3 minutes

The recorder/converter was more than I would have liked to spend. Looking at the prices today, it has decreased in price, naturally. After years and years of planning to send the films off to be converted, the memories are indeed priceless! I definitely do not regret finally leaping in and creating these new OLD memories for my family to share. 

Read More

Minnesota Bound

It took 8 years to make it back to the great state of Minnesota for a visit. 8 years! That did included a trip to Wisconsin in 2018 for Kevin and Rachel's wedding. It also included a 4 year stretch  of Bay Area life, AND, of course, Covid!!! The world has changed a lot since 2014. So many beautiful souls lost since we last visited. 😥

After literal years of not being able to visit with our family, 2022 has been filled with an abundance of family time. In addition of our trip back to Minnesota, each of our children have made at least one trip out to California to visit, as well. So much joy fills this mother's heart. 

The following photos were taken just a couple of days apart. 

The first photo was taken in California on our own personal holiday, Laborgiving. A holiday I started years and years ago. What was at the time, the weekend before school started, we would cook up an entire Thanksgiving type dinner. Then, as we prepared clothes, backpacks and snacks for the coming months of school, we had a delicious meal, PLUS nummy leftovers to munch on. 

Tessa, Adam and grandbabies, along with Thomas, a surprise visitor from NYC, and Natalie all joined us for this year's edition of Laborgiving.🦃 

Then, we got on a plane and headed off to Minnesota. This photo below shows us after dinner at Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis with the rest of the kids, Three grandbabies(not so babylike, anymore). Kevin and Rachel, Hilary and David, Katy, Natalie and us. Seeing the entire family 'together' within in hours of of each event almost makes up for the long, lonely years apart.

In the years we have been away, each of our Minnesota residing children have purchased their own homes. Thus, we got the pleasure of see each of their homes personally for the first time. First, we stayed at Kevin and Rachel's place in Minneapolis, just a few blocks away from Lake Nokomis. Being that close to the airport, they kindly picked us up at 2:00am on Wednesday morning. 

After a homemade breakfast buffet and a walk around the neighborhood, we took a ride up to Rush City to spend the day and night at Katy and Katrina's house. A quick trip over to Cambridge to place flowers on Molly, Doc and Shirlee's gravesites, we headed back down to Minneapolis. We did return back up to Katy's place on Monday with Hilary to help move some things out to the dump and build a fairly garden. 

 

Back in the cities, we met up with our three grandbabies (11, 5 and 3 yrs old) for the first time. The entire gang shared a  meal at the seasonal restaurant, Sea Salt Eatery yards away from Minnehaha Falls. 

While waiting for the girls to get out of school, we spent the day with Hilary. No trip to the Twin Cities would be complete without a visit to the world famous Mall of  America.  

After a couple hours at the country's largest mall at 5.6 million square feet, we head over to Plymouth to see Hilary and David's house for the first time. 

We spent time building puzzles with the littles before baking monster cookies and mixing up some ooey gooey chocolatey puppy chow with them, as well. 

 

The plan to help get Hilary's house ready for the Minnesota Bound get together on Saturday went awry as we spent the evening relaxing with the family while David prepared us grill steak salad for our meal. Natalie read to the girls while Rachel played games with them. Hilary taught me how to crochet stuffed pumpkins to help decorate for the season. The mellow chaos reminded me of many holidays from days gone by.

 

Hilary and David rented us a room at the Marriot hotel a block away. This allowed us all to have a swimming adventure before a day filled with mowing and raking and preparing for friends and relative to visit us. Will little spare time, it was great to have everyone come to join us for a great evening. A bonfire was built early and burned all day long. Oh my goodness, do I miss the scent of wood fires burning on cool autumn day.  

 

A small frog mistook the fire as a toasty spa and leapt in to warm himself. The girls were very sad for the poor little guy. While I had time to bake up a batch of gramma gibbons beans, David did the majority of the barbequing for the while group. As the night wore down, and many headed on home, a screen was setup in the darkened backyard to watch Pinocchio. With the bonfire still burning, and the grandbabies snuggled up in blankets on the wicker sofa, we closed out another delightful evening in Minnesota.

Our busy Saturday rolled over into Sunday in the park with family. Como Park and Zoo, that is. With a wagon full of kids, we watched the seals, visited with the primates and saw timber wolves walking through the woods. 

After going none stop for days, we finished our Sunday watching the sunset over Lake Nokomis. And then ice cream! Another beautiful peaceful evening the family.

As mentioned before, we spent Monday morning helping Katy out in Rush City. A quick trip back to Minneapolis for lunch at Punch Pizza and a walk across the Stone Arch Bridge. My favorite touristy spot in the cities.

 

If Monday wasn't already full of fun and family, we were treated to Brazilian Barbeque to finish off the day. So tasty. The wait staff walked around the dining room cutting seared meats from long metal skewers. 

On our last full Minnesota day, we chilled out at the Lake. Lake Nokomis, again. We stopped at a craft cheese shop for sandwiches and...cheese. By bringing our own picnic out to the lake, we were able to spent time just watching the ducks swim and the leaves change. 

What could be better than another Minnesota bonfire? Nothing, of course. This time, we built a fire in Kevin's backyard. With the flames of the fire snapping away, we warmed up in their backyard hot tub. All three girls spent times cuddling with the family ferrets, and of course Leko, Kevin and Rachel's new pupperdo. 

The last night in Minnesota before our early, early morning flight was the perfect evening to complete our amazingly grand family filled trip to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Truly hope to be back again before another 8 years passes us by.

Read More